Calling all readers and personal finance bloggers –
If you could improve one area of your personal finance management, what would it be?
Would you do a better job of budgeting?
Would you save more in a specific budget category?
Would you spend less for certain items?
Would you keep better records?
What ONE area needs the most improvement?
Leave a comment and let us know!
If you have a blog, and you want to write a post about this topic – contact me, and I’ll link to your post.
Answers from other bloggers –
Wide Open Wallet would like to spend less on food.
Making Cents of Debt is working to stay on budget.
Cash Money Life needs to do a better job of organizing financial accounts.
Mrs. Micah would like to improve shopping habits.
Blunt Money is going to learn more about investing.
I tend to splurge sometimes for no apparent reason, simply because after paying bills and investments I have a positive cash flow. Not sure why I feel guilty about doing this
I need to do a better job of investing money for retirement outside of my 401k. I keep meaning to open a Roth IRA but I haven’t quite got around to it yet.
Get my wife to stop thinking “But I need to buy gifts!”
I have worked hard to cut down my expenses in all areas and am doing a good job with saving, but the one category of expenses that I still need to cut more is food (groceries, dining out and lunch cost me a lot more than they should as a single person). The problem is planning. One month, recently, I planned in advance and bought all my food at a reasonably priced supermarket (rather than at the last minute at the over-priced deli around the corner). I brought lunch to work every day and made homemade dinners every night for the whole month. I saved hundreds of dollars. But after that month, I started to go back to my old habits. This is the main thing I want to work on right now, because I feel as though the rest of my spending, saving, etc. is going well.
I agree with Moneymonk, my wife and I tend to have the same problem… Usually around the middle of the month we’ll have paid off all our bills and instead of taking what’s left over and saving it, we think “Hey, we have money and don’t have to pay bills for a while…”
And that’s how we ended up with our last car.
For me, it’s two things – one is doing a better job anticipating irregular expenses, and the other is reducing the amount we spend on our annual vacation.
The irregular expenses are a bit better this year now that we have last year’s budget-to-actuals to look at, but there are still unexpected surprises that take us off track.
The vacations are because we all enjoy traveling and find it hard to do it on a budget. Or rather, on a low budget – we stay within our limits but our limits are pretty high!
I could also do a better job with the food costs, both eating out and groceries. I’m good with coupons, but I’m a picky eater and usually prefer the brand-name stuff over the generics. Not good 🙂
I think montoring expenses is the greatest challenge of most people in reference to their finances
Hands down we eat out too much. I budget a certain amount for Dining Out and every month without fail we exceed that amount by a lot. I made it a mini-goal of ours this month to stick to our Dining Out budget. We just need to focus and not eat out everytime we get stressed or when our kitchen is dirty.
I think at could do a better job at saying no to a sale. Lately we’ve spent extra money buying shoes for my husband because they were on super sale and they were a good brand. While we pay cash for them, these purchases usually leave us tight in our budget for a few days.
I would also love to have a Roth IRA for my husband. Right now we only have one for me and his 401K.
DH and I need to create a budget. And stick to it. We do pretty well, at least I think we do, but it will interesting to see it all in black and white.
Hi NCN,
I’ve been spending time this weekend getting my accounts in order. It’s never fun to do that kind of maintenance, but it is worth it to know that my wife and I will be on the same page when it comes to all our account information. Thanks for including a link to my article!